


as one in suffering all that suffers nothing

by Caora (Soujin)



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-15
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-22 12:23:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8285713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Soujin/pseuds/Caora
Summary: You wish you'd asked him what it meant, but you didn't. You grinned and shut your eyes and after a while you heard his breathing soften, and then you let yourself sleep too. Most of the time you figured you could understand what Goody meant even when you missed particular words, and you weren't wrong. Now those words irritate you, like a horse with a stone in its shoe, biting at you when you walk on them. They're little scraps of mysteries. Extra talk you could be carrying with you now. One more minute of the memory to hold on to. ---AU where Billy survives.





	

**Author's Note:**

> "The whole thing reminds me of a quote from the end of Seven Samurai from the Sam Chisholm character -- “So. Again we are defeated. The farmers have won. Not us.”" --my beta reader

as one in suffering all that suffers nothing

i.

This is what it means to outlive Goodnight Robicheaux: the nights are quiet, and you sleep through them. There aren't any dreams to wake you, or Goodnight's muffled underwater gasps and pleas, the soft sounds of his body shifting restlessly on the bedroll. Everything is still.

You recover slowly from your wounds. The other three who lived ride out without you -- you understand this, whether or not you feel charitably towards them. They didn't know you. The thread between you and them was Goody, and Goody is gone. In the meantime, you stay in Emma Cullen's house. She has depthless generosity for the men who helped to save Rose Creek.

"I don't pretend to understand," she says, telling you without telling you that she knows. "I miss Matthew every day."

You nod. You've always feigned knowing less English than you actually know, to avoid talking to people you're not interested in talking to. Goody found it hilarious. Here, though, there's no point in refusing a kindness you're not likely to see again.

She doesn't talk to you much when she's changing your bandages. Perhaps she understands that you're at her mercy in those moments, unable to do anything but wait passively until her work is done. Only when she's finished, and you have the choice to shake your head and close your eyes and make it plain that you don't want her company, does she ever speak. She's kind. But Goody was kind too.

"I miss talking to him," she says, sitting by the straw mattress she set up for you, her hands in her lap. "We were only married three years, but we used to talk all the time. I miss being soft. Oh, that sounds foolish, but I miss it. What you men did for Rose Creek was grand, but I wish he'd been here to see it through with me." Her gaze goes beyond you. Out in the Rose Creek cemetery, Matthew is buried with Goody and Faraday and Horne and scores of other men who've left someone behind to keep a quieter home now.

You have nothing to say to her. You understand her loss, but you have nothing to give. You sleep through the night now undisturbed, and no one's nightmares wake you.

ii.

When you're well enough to leave, you move on. You could stay tethered to Goody's grave like a dog or a ghost, but Goody wouldn't know. Rose Creek has nothing for you, a man whose livelihood is made on guns and knives. They're building it up again. They've repaired many of the buildings that were damaged -- filled in the trenches where you crouched with the fuses, listening to the rain sound of hoofbeats, knowing Goody had left without you and half-sick with grief and anger and joy, knowing he wouldn't die there. They've put a new bell tower in the church.

You never look at the church.

It was Goody's flask that saved you, and which should have saved him.

Mrs. Cullen is sorry to see you go, but even she is ready to rebuild here. It's no place for you now. You could learn how to live with peace if you tried; you know if you stayed here another year, another five, you'd learn how to put hand to plough, or let the new sheriff deputize you, or some other way fall into the pattern of things. But you don't want to.

This is what it means to outlive Goody: you could use your gun now whenever you choose. There's no one now to flinch at the shots.

You use your knives anyway. You used them before: it was just a happy coincidence that you could kill without making Goody's shell-shock worse. They were yours to begin with and now at the end they're yours.

Mrs. Cullen kisses you goodbye, having made certain you were provisioned, and someone whose name you should know by now gives you a horse. You ride on from Rose Creek.

The desert, the scrub prairies, seem different now, although they look the same and probably will look the same forever. A few more houses, more cattle, maybe, but still the same dry grass and spare trees. The same vast expanse of sky above your head. The sky is the same one it's always been, from Korea to Shanghai to here, blue-black and star-pricked, even if the stars are different.

At night you sleep in your bedroll, lying on your back. Sometimes when Goody couldn't sleep he'd lie awake like this and tell tales. Storytelling always seemed to put him at ease -- he'd talk in his soft drawl for hours, recounting his childhood in North Carolina, his adolescence in Tennessee. He'd tell how he apprenticed to a gunsmith for three years, then got bored of it and went to college, which is what his father had always wanted anyway. A lot of money wasted on erudition, Goody would say, but at least he got to read Shakespeare.

"Have you ever read Hamlet?" he asked once, and you laughed at him.

"No."

"That's a shame. I was going to make a reference, but now that I know you'll be ignorant of it--"

"Make it anyway," you said. You were in a warm mood. The night was mild enough that you both were still naked after bathing in the river, and you lay facing him, your blanket draped over your waist, listening to him talk. You'd jerked each other off already and you were sleepy and satisfied.

Goody laughed back at you, and combed his fingers through his beard. He still had a pull of tension in him, but then he never really lost it. To ease it even that much was a victory. "I was going to tell you there are more things in heaven and earth--"

He paused, and you kicked lightly at his foot with yours. "And?"

"More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But then you aren't a philosopher. It was flawed from the beginning."

"Should have kept quiet."

Goody laughed again. "I know. That's a recurring problem. Like Hamlet, too prone to soliloquies."

"I don't know what that means."

"Good, you'll make less sport of me."

You wish you'd asked him what it meant, but you didn't. You grinned and shut your eyes and after a while you heard his breathing soften, and then you let yourself sleep too. Most of the time you figured you could understand what Goody meant even when you missed particular words, and you weren't wrong. Now those words irritate you, like a horse with a stone in its shoe, biting at you when you walk on them. They're little scraps of mysteries. Extra talk you could be carrying with you now. One more minute of the memory to hold on to.

iii.

You get drunk. Used to be you'd stay half-sober, at least, to keep an eye on him. A man with a vocabulary like that was especially skilled at making other men think he was making fun of them. Goody picked fights without even meaning to, though often as not he did mean it. Most of the time he could see them through, but every once in a while he'd get too drunk to handle himself.

Sometimes the other fellow, or fellows, would jeer at him for letting you put your arm under his and steer him away. They'd try to get a rise out of you instead, toss slurs at you, or insults, or innuendos. On your own account you're hard to goad, too disciplined to lose sight of the odds. Goody was the one who would turn cold-angry over the question of your honor. Some lingering Southern gentility. Drunk, though, like that, he'd only trust you. Let you guide him somewhere quiet and take care of him, wash vomit out of his beard if you had to, undress him and lie him down.

There's no one now to return the favor. You get sick outside the saloon, clinging to the railing with one hand to anchor yourself. Your throat burns.

iv.

You go back to quick-draw competitions, less your manager. It isn't like it used to be, without Goody's showmanship and authority, or the quick flinch and blink you'd always catch from the corner of your eye when the shots fired.

You quit that and start to trail Sam Chisholm instead.

Goody used to tell stories about Chisholm, who he always called Sam. One of a hundred of those sleepless nights, when you were watching firelight edge Goody's profile, he said, "Sam saved my life, the son of a bitch. He saved me."

You kept quiet. It was one of the stories you'd heard before, and Goody just liked to get it over with. He didn't spin it out the way he usually would.

"Saved it at Antietam, and three years later again. Found me behind the blacksmith's in the filthy unholy hours of the morning, with a shotgun under my chin, and talked me out of it. Sam can talk anyone into or out of anything. Talked me out of my goddamn bullet."

Your gut turned hollow, the way it always did when you heard that story or thought about Goody dead in an alley with his head blown off before you ever met him. But still you didn't say anything.

"If we ever run into Sam, you'll see," Goody said. "He'll tell us to do something, and by God we'll do it."

You know Chisholm was the last person to speak to Goody the night he tried to run from Rose Creek. You knew it then. You knew before you started drinking that night that he wouldn't say anything to you, too shamed to face you, knowing you'd know he was leaving without either of you seeing the other. You can remember easily, in spite of getting black-out drunk, that you'd hated Chisholm for being able to talk Goody into coming but not into staying, and then hating him the next day for somehow bringing Goody back.

Chisholm has gone back to working as a marshall, bringing men in. He's easy to follow for that. Everyone remembers the tall black lawman with the soft, final voice. They remember how he was polite but unflinching, unwavering, how he made a bar fight look dignified. They remember all of that long after Chisholm has gone on, and they tell you where to go.

You catch up to him in Wichita.

You sit down at the bar beside him, and he looks at you, says nothing. He orders a shot of whiskey and pushes it to you. You drink it.

"I'm sorry," he says.

You don't say anything.

v.

This is what it means to outlive Goody: no more stories. You fall in with the man who killed him. Chisholm doesn't refuse you. The two of you ride in silence. You bed down in silence. Chisholm never wakes you up screaming or choking. He never tells you stories.

"If you won't read the goddamn play, I'll tell it to you," Goody said, a year before Rose Creek. He was lying in your bedroll, his thin back pressed to your chest, his hair under your nose. He smelled like tobacco smoke and sweat and horse, edged around with gunpowder. You laughed noiselessly, but you knew he could feel it, especially as he elbowed you awkwardly in the ribs. "All right, you philistine, this is England's greatest treasure you're laughing at."

He told the story like it was his own, but there were cactus patches of words that made no sense to you, which you thought were probably quoted. You'd been planning to doze off while he was talking, but you didn't.

When he finished you poked him. "And I reminded you of this?"

"You remind me of Horatio."

"He doesn't do anything."

Goody laughed so hard he shook you. "No one does anything! Weren't you paying attention, _cher_? But no, he protects the prince."

"And you're the prince."

"Precisely, you comprehend. Mad but north-northwest."

"Hmm."

You still don't want to read it. It won't be the same if it's not in Goody's lazy drawl, half-incomprehensible. Besides, the prince is dead. You didn't protect him. In the darkness of your night camp, you put your hand to the flask inside your shirt pocket, tracing the fleur de lis with your fingertips.

You wonder if Chisholm has ever read Shakespeare. Then you wonder if Goody ever stayed up and told him stories.

You picture that. It's easy to imagine Goody, shaken after being discovered by Chisholm, trying to play it off with an easy grin and his expansive charm, pretending it was a misunderstanding somehow. Easy to imagine Chisholm taking his old acquaintance to the saloon for a steadying drink, and Goody starting to tell how he came to be there, shaping details like a potter with a bowl on the wheel.

You don't weep. You haven't wept since you were a child. But your fingers tighten around the flask until you know the fleur de lis is being stamped into your palm.

vi.

This is what it means to outlive Goody: the world is dull. The spark of fantasy he dreamed into it is lost.

No one touches you. At night you hold no one in your arms. There is no one who treats you like a lover.

There is no one who sees you like sunlight, whose face eases at the sight of you, who looks back for you when he rides ahead.

You remember how Goody told you that Hamlet stopped Horatio from drinking poison and dying with him, and how then it was just another story. Now you know Hamlet was selfish.

This is what it means: you are alone.

**Author's Note:**

> idk i'm an asshole


End file.
